The Internet and the World Wide Web (i.e., the “Web”) have become critical, integral parts of commercial operations, personal lives, and the education process. The World Wide Web enables users of the Internet to conveniently access resources offered by the Internet. In the Web environment, information resources are typically stored in the form of hypertext documents called “web pages” which can be accessed and read by users of the Web. The web pages are typically stored on web servers coupled to the Internet. Each web page can be uniquely identified by an address called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that enables users to access the web page.
Users typically access the web pages utilizing a software application called a “web browser” which executes on a client computer coupled to the Internet, The web browser is a type of client application that enables users to select, retrieve, and perceive resources on the Web. Examples of web browsers include the Mozilla® Firefox® browser, the Microsoft® Internet Explorer®, and so forth. Firefox is a registered trademark of Mozilla Foundation in the United States, other countries, or both. Internet Explorer is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Web browser users perform a broad variety of activities ranging from activities for accessing information such as news, weather information, sports related information, stock and business information, etc. It is common practice for users to visit sets of websites in a distinguishable pattern. For example, the user may visit the same websites every morning to check local news, national news, and the joke of the day. The same user may commonly visit sites containing local weather and traffic conditions at some other time. The user may visit other sets of websites in a distinguishable pattern throughout the day.
The majority of prior art web browsers have been developed to reduce the time that the user spends in accessing web pages or information of interest to the user. Some browsers enable a user to manually create “bookmarks” for web sites and determine how to categorize them within their bookmarks list. Such a list may be unwieldy and cumbersome depending on the number of websites. The user must manually navigate to the desired website in their bookmarks list. Additionally, it is inefficient to visit book-marked sites that have not been modified since the last visit. Visiting sites that have no new content wastes a user's time. Note that browser “plug-ins” have been implemented, which can monitor pages for changes and provide alerts when changed. Such features are not the same as “clicking” a link, but do solve a part of the problem associated with so-called “stale” sites. One such an example of this type of plug-in is a Firefox® plug-in referred to as Update Notifier™, and which is available at the following website: http://www.longfocus.com/firefox/updatenotifier/.
Other browsers maintain a history of web pages or web sites visited by the user. Such a history lists web pages or web sites the user visited. It does not enable the user to differentiate visited web sites that were of interest from visited web sites that were not of interest, except if the user manually maintains the history as he or she browses, such as by deleting from “history” visited web sites that were not of interest. Another exception involves the case where a user has browsed a site many times, and therefore may use the history feature of some browsers to sort the history by the particular sites(s) most viewed.
A user generally must manually navigate to the desired website in their list of recently visited sites. Similarly, in a memory method, the user must manually type in the URL of the desired website from memory into the address bar for each website repeated visit, which can be a difficult task for many users. Prior methods often require extraneous user involvement with the web browser interface to navigate often-visited websites.
Therefore, a need exists for an improved method for predictive browsing that automatically navigates to often-visited websites based on a user's browsing behavior and verifies content updates of often-visited websites, as disclosed in further detail herein.